


Ark

by Oureias



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Czerny Family, Gen, Noah's Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-02-04 11:26:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12770061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oureias/pseuds/Oureias
Summary: This is what Mrs. Czerny knows.





	Ark

This is what Mrs. Czerny knows. 

She knows that her life is perfect. A loving husband, three beautiful children, money to burn. She knows the power of a gracious smile and a well-cut dress. She knows the multi-million effect of a tete-a-tete at a cocktail party, the subtle control of the click of red soled heels against a marble floor. She knows that she and her husband appear  _ nouveau riche  _ to the high society they stir in, despite two decades of mixing. She knows the glitter and gilt of society parties and the guilt of her husband’s business dealings. She knows how to limit the blood on her hands to the color of her nail lacquer, and how to match it to the flush of her lips. 

She knows that her husband is having an affair with some girl, younger and bouncier and trashier than she. She knows that she doesn’t really care. He still holds her on his arm, and she still holds the name Czerny, and it’s her signature on half the checks. She’d been so naive to believe in love. 

She knows that her husband indulges her son, allows him to parade around in a maraschino truck and skateboard to school and receive notices home for inappropriate behavior and subpar schoolwork. She knows that her eldest daughter spends more than she does on clothing and sometimes eats nothing but chili lemonade for weeks on end. She knows that her youngest watches everyone from shadowy corners; she waits for the appropriate time to tell her that what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over. It’s no use looking for the truth when you can’t do anything about it. 

She knows that her husband has eyes on Noah to take over the company. She knows that discipline cases with B- averages don’t become CEOs. She convinces her reluctant husband to send her son away to Aglionby Academy. 

She regrets that decision for the rest of her life. 

 

She finds Barrington Whelk to be a thoroughly unpleasant boy, but his aunt’s husband is Mr. Czerny’s first cousin and his father has some contacts that could prove useful, so she suffers him. Noah’s discipline cases have lessened since meeting him, so she doesn’t intervene there either. Instead, she carefully watches over the rim of her single champagne as the bottles vanish from the liquor cabinet every time Noah visits home, and supervises from afar as notebooks fill with maps and scrawled red pen. 

She introduces Noah to Piper Laumonier over Winter Break. She’s a pretty little thing that reminds Mrs. Czerny of herself, with something steely and dark under the bright white teeth and red holiday dress. That girl is no one’s fool. Mrs. Czerny compares her to her Adele, hugging Noah’s shadow as he swings around the room, and her smile becomes fixed. She loves her children. 

By February, Piper is dating Noah only in name and has shifted her attentions to Whelk. Mrs. Czerny knows that Noah doesn’t particularly care, he’s far too similar to her to care about something so trivial, but the insult pricks. The Whelk boy raids their liquor cabinet again and she finds her son vomiting schnapps on her Persian carpet.

In early March, Mrs. Czerny places an anonymous phone call. By the ides, the Whelk empire falls.

The last time that she saw her son, he smelled like alcohol and hugged her goodbye and left a shower of glitter all over her charcoal lounge blazer. She’d scolded him at the time and he’d merely run a hand through that peroxide blonde hair and laughed at her. 

Two weeks later, she picks the blazer up from dry cleaning and a spray of glitter comes from a seam. Gracefully, controlled, she sinks to the ground in the middle of her walk-in closet.

 

The police are unhelpful, expectedly, but when even her private investigator comes up with nothing, she knows that her son is gone. Her husband blusters around it, threatening. It’s one of their competitors, he says. One of the people who got on the wrong end of a deal with them. Someone jealous of their rise. They’ll get a ransom note, you’ll see. 

Months pass, with no note. No contact. No clues. 

Aglionby personnel come by, shamefaced, and deliver an expulsion letter. The police have declared him a runaway. His car was gone, none of his friends have any idea where he went, and Barrington Whelk says that Noah had been talking about Nevada. They put watches on all the state lines. Mrs. Czerny puts a watch on Barrington Whelk. 

She is calm in public. She attends brunch with the wives and accepts their condolences, takes their advice, moves on with her life. Her husband sinks himself further into his trashy young brunette and she blinks at her face in the mirror as she does her makeup. The mascara curls her eyelashes high, blush adds color to her cheeks, her hair is never less than presentable. She wears the right cuts, the right colors. She shops at opportune times and makes appearances at the correct parties. She does Czerny proud.

She doesn’t cry. Even at night, when her husband isn’t there. She is perfect, as she always is, and in her perfection, cold. 

 

Adele takes it hard, refusing to speak or eat, and when she locks herself in her room, Mrs. Czerny calmy hires a man to remove the hinges and moves in to hold her daughter. Adele is freezing, shaking like a leaf in the wind, and Mrs. Czerny holds her. She loves her children.

Adele peroxides her hair and Mrs. Czerny’s heart skips a beat whenever she walks into the room, but she never shows it. Adele begins wearing glitter eyeliner and brilliant lipstick, and though the whispers rise in the back of Mrs. Czerny’s mind ( _ nouveau riche nouveau riche _ ), she says nothing.

 

Time passes.

At one societal brunch, Mrs. Gansey pulls her aside and asks in a low voice if she could reccommend any good therapists. Her son nearly died, you see, and she’s worried for his mental health. Mrs. Czerny pauses, smiles graciously in a way that bares every single one of her sharpest teeth, then replies that she can’t help, as much as she would love to. 

Mrs. Gansey looks at her strangely, like she’s made of ice, but Mrs. Czerny merely holds her smile until the woman leaves. Alone, she raises her hand up and just barely brushes the tips of her fingers between her brows, smoothing away the slight wrinkle that has formed. She breathes through her nose, once, twice, then sets a practiced lilt to her lips and steps back into the chattering room.

 

Her eldest daughter marries a Berling, respectable and rich and old money, and she attends the wedding with a perfect royal blue dress and immaculate makeup. Her mouth smiles for pictures. She fixes the wisps of hair fallen from her daughter’s updo. She dabs politely at her eyes as her husband walks her daughter down the aisle. She gives an eloquently rehearsed speech and offers a toast of finest champagne. 

Anonymously, she enrolls herself in grief therapy. A woman there speaks of how certain she is that her toddler is haunting her, is trying to send a message from the Great Beyond. Mrs. Czerny collects her pocketbook, stands, and calmly leaves the room. She had never believed in God. 

Her eldest has a daughter and christens her Noel. Adele enrolls in high school. The third anniversary of Noah comes around and her husband drinks a bottle of whiskey alone in his study. Adele shuts herself in her room and her eldest goes out to a party, leaving Noel to her. 

She stands above the crib and adjusts the blankets around the infant. Her scarlet nail polish is stark against the baby’s skin, against the sweet white innocence of the fluffy blanket. The baby stirs and bats at her fingers, burbling slightly. Noel’s eyes open, wide and brown, just like Noah’s, and Mrs. Czerny’s hand stills like death. 

She remembers wrapping blankets around her son, the needlessly expensive —buy it just because you can— embroidery and baby paraphernalia. She remembers wrapping blankets around her siblings, the same blanket for all five of them, when they were too cold while her mother was out working. She remembers being the oldest, what a responsibility that entails. 

She thinks about how Noah knew that, even though she’d never taught him. She thinks of how her husband, how her children, how Noel will never know the pinch of money. She thinks about what it’s taken to reach this point. She thinks about Noah. 

She picks up Noel when she starts to cry and rocks her back to sleep. In the light from the chandelier, her nails appear like blood.

 

Her husband admits one evening that Noah is dead and she takes a long inhale through her nose. He follows it with the claim that he’s sure that Noah is watching them right then, flickering in the corner with his face smashed in, and she stands up and leaves the room. 

She sells the speedboat from their villa on the coast of France and he never brings it up again.

 

Noel’s first word is  _ mama _ , which brings joy to everyone’s hearts, but her first imaginary friend is “a blonde boy in a sweater” and Mr. Czerny’s blood runs cold. He shows her a photo of Noah to which she nods happily and Mrs. Czerny sweeps the entire house. Every photo, every reference, every remnant of her son, she places them all in a large trunk and leaves it in the middle of his untouched room. She locks the door on the Blink-182 posters and the skateboards and the skull decals and no one enters again. She gives the key to a gardener to bury, then promptly informs him he’s been released from service. 

 

The seventh March since his disappearance comes around and a neatly typed letter makes its way into their mail, declaring Noah legally dead. She leaves it open on the dining room table and takes a seat nearby, eyes focusing on nothing. A hand running through peroxide blonde hair. A riotous laugh. The smell of schnapps and a spray of glitter. The thrumming rumble of a skateboard on carpeted hall. His narrow shoulders in a black cut suit, dancing with Adele. His scorn when she’d caught him smoking cigarettes. The eyesore that was his cherry Mustang. As a child, chubby palms raised up for a hug. 

There have been no sightings. No anonymous tips. No arrests.

As far as anyone knew, Noah had merely been swallowed up by the forest. 

 

The night before the Gansey boy finds her son, she dreams of Noah. He’s sitting on the back of his red Mustang, white hair and quirked eyebrows just like she remembers. He kicks his heels as he sits, but says nothing. His eyes are huge and dark in his face. She tries to say something to him, maybe an apology, but her words stick in her throat and she wakes up grasping at the dark. 

The police tell her that Noah was murdered, which she had always known. They say that Barrington Whelk was the prime suspect, which she had always known. They say that none of it is her fault, and she merely smiles at them until they top talking. 

She’s surprised at how large the bones are when she visits the forensics department to receive the isotopic analysis of Noah’s teeth. Her husband had insisted on this ridiculous rigmarole, clutching at straws, hoping against hope that Noah’s wallet had fallen on some other boy. His sweater was put on someone else. His watch and his shoes. Mrs. Czerny held her tongue and let him rage. This was Noah. 

They confirm it for her and one of the technicians bravely puts a hand on her shoulder. She doesn’t react, doesn’t move, doesn’t give an inch of herself to grief, and they slowly withdraw. The folds of her black coat gather around her like wings and she sweeps out of the room, red soled heels clacking on the linoleum floor. She does not leave her son behind. Those bones are not him. He has been gone since he walked out of her home and left a shower of glitter in his place. 

 

They bury the bones in the family plot, deep in the back of Henrietta valley, date of death seven years prior. The graveyard is dotted with names that she recognizes. Berling, Garrick, Clayden, Everly, Paxton, and Czerny. She thinks of how she scraped funds and worked 60 hour weeks to pay for her father’s headstone. She thinks of the shimmer of lipstick and the ambition that’s left her here. She thinks of all the blood she’s washed down the sink.

She looks at the neat black tarp that covers the dirt that covers the bones, then fixes her eyes off into the gray-green trees. Her neat black shoes are planted firmly in the ground. Red soled heels don’t do well on grass. 

“Mrs. Czerny?” She turns her head, black umbrella swiveling with her like a ballerina. A girl approaches, wearing a green shirt covered over in unravelling black lace. She looks as if she hasn’t slept well, and her hair is awry. She stammers for a moment, then informs them tremulously that her mother is a psychic and she has a message from her son. Mrs. Czerny doesn’t need to look at her husband to see the fear and pain written on his face. She keeps hers perfectly blank. 

“No, you don’t,” she says politely. She has never believed in the afterlife. 

“Please, don’t do this,” her husband says from behind her. The girl’s face tightens, like she’s forcing herself to stay. Like she’s only doing this under duress. 

“"Mrs. Czerny,” she says, voice breaking softly, “he’s sorry for drinking your birthday schnapps."

The wind brushes through the trees softly, like a whisper. Her umbrella shifts with it, pressing against her wrist as if it’s holding her hand. Adele, with her peroxide blonde hair mostly hidden under a hat, looks up at her with wide brown eyes. A soft breath drives out of her husband.

The girl looks empty, like she’s waiting for the wind to blow her away. In the distance behind her are two young men in dark suits, looking somber and pressed. The Gansey boy, who found the bones. His friend, here to support. Her vision blurs and for one moment, she sees a third figure next to them, narrow shoulders filling out a black cut suit, a shock of peroxide hair spilling over his brow.

Mrs. Czerny starts to cry. 

 

This is what Mrs. Czerny knows. She knows that her life is good. An agreeable husband, two beautiful children, a granddaughter, and money to burn. She knows that Barrington Whelk skipped town and can't be found or brought to justice. She knows that none of the hitmen she sent out will return to collect their money for his head. She knows that her son is buried six feet underground. She knows that the Gansey boy with the broken thumb knows more than he says he does, but she also knows that Henrietta is a place for secrets.   
Mostly, she knows the power of a red soled shoe clicking on a marble floor, the influence of a well tailored dress, and the multi-million effect of a tête-à-tête at a cocktail party. She knows how her restrained strength has faded the _nouveau_ from the _riche,_ and she knows that her teeth grow sharper by the day. She washes her hands every night before she sleeps, and imagines that she can run the red water clear under the tap.

She knows that she dreamed one night of rain on the shoulders of an Aglionby sweater, dreamed one night of a lightning strike in a butterfly kiss, dreamed one night that Noah stood before her, sad and tired but whole and well, and that he stretched out a hand and she took it and he was as real and warm as anything she’d ever felt. She knows that he brushed some of the loose hair out of her face and told her that nothing was her fault and kissed her forehead with dry lips like leaves in the wind. 

She knows that when she woke up, her temple was streaked with glitter and Noel was crying with the dawn. 


End file.
